


To Have and To Hold

by feverdreambloodopera



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Angst, Bathing/Washing, Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark Will Graham, Disjointed narrative, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Flashbacks, Fluff, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Marriage, Medical Procedures, Murder Husbands, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Post-Fall (Hannibal), Sexual Tension, Slow Burn, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Wedding Night, Whump, actually this whole fic is about subverting fandom tropes, and team Sassy Science, disrupted narrative, haha - Freeform, mostly angst tho, not really the way fandom does dark will tho, not same universe as Crossing Caïna, sharing a hotel bed, small mentions of Jack Crawford, this was supposed to be a hannibal whump but it ended up being whump the both of them, violence mention, will's transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:01:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 12,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28345803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feverdreambloodopera/pseuds/feverdreambloodopera
Summary: After the fall from the cliff, Hannibal and Will attempt to make good their escape by traveling to a hotel to hide among plastic surgery patients as they recover. But Hannibal's injuries lead to serious illness, and Will must decide how to do right by Hannibal, or even whether he can save him at all.
Relationships: Will Graham & Hannibal Lecter, Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 57
Kudos: 114





	1. From This Day Forward

Hannibal Lecter was dying. 

Warm water lapped around Will’s chest, its heat foreign and incomprehensible. It stirred as he bent his sore legs to settle back against the white resin of the bathtub and rest. Weak light filtered through the window above him, looking out on the dull world of St. Louis, still held in the iron grip of winter. There was a dim sound of traffic. Sirens shrilled in the distance. Life marched on, indifferent as always to his suffering. Will was glad.

Sometimes, in the haze of reality and dream that was Will’s sleepless mind, he saw Hannibal suspended above him, floating, as he had been in the swell of waves. Body limp, arms outstretched as if to God, a halo of light cascaded about his shorn hair as, above them, dawn broke through the gray clouds. 

Where Hannibal was now, there was only silence. In the end, he had been just a man. 

***

The southern hills rolled like waves, arrested by time and air, stone thrust by millennia into the backbones of mountains and then eroded away. Bare branches clawed the wind lifted by tractor-trailers roaring down the highway. Once passed, they fell behind, forgotten, replaced by others, forgotten in their own turn. Wheels spun away between mile markers. 

A billboard declared in broad, black letters, _He who was without sin died for you!_ above a diner’s _Tuesday Special: Foie Gras with Fatback_. These too vanished, as the great cities of Athens and Rome, born again in the American South, rose and fell just past the next interstate exits. 

Hannibal’s head lolled, chin on his chest, rocking with the rickety suspension of the primer-gray 1976 Chevrolet pickup Will had hotwired. The dappled shadows of bare tree branches flickered over his face, sunlight glimmering in the beads of sweat that dripped from his brow, down from his cropped hair and into the stubble on his cheek and jaw. Shudders shook his lean frame from time to time. Will shuddered too, unable to get warm in the drafty cab of the pickup.

The miles retreated slowly, time chasing ever more swiftly on their heels. 

Will glanced often at Hannibal, at the man he once knew, lost now to unconsciousness. Fevered words, unintelligible except for Will’s name, dropped from his lips like so much water and salt.

Will tried to decide if Hannibal had a soul, and if he did, whether he would be stubborn about giving it up. He was not certain he himself had a soul, or anyone, but even if he did, he was not at all ready to jump to the conclusion that this would mean Hannibal had one too. 

But if it were only Hannibal’s soulless flesh expiring in the seat next to him, would that mean Will had more time to save him, or less?

Will blinked and awoke to the thunder of the rumble strip beneath the tires. He wrestled the truck back into the lane, sending Hannibal’s face to smear against the window. Will reached out, his injuries shooting agony through his chest and neck, and he gripped Hannibal’s shirt in his fist to haul him back to a sitting position. 

The exertion tore the shoulder wound again, and it bled, hot and seeping, sticking to his clothes. He wanted to press his fingers against it, to push out the yellow contagion and find relief from the bursting pressure. 

If he didn’t get them help soon, he thought as his mind drifted again, neither of them would be any good for eating.

***

The Marcus Hotel loomed fourteen stories into the midnight sky, above humming city streets, its three grand brick towers glowing in the amber light of buzzing, high pressure sodium lamps. The building’s connecting wings disappeared into the black night beyond. 

The dull ring of traffic noise--horns honking and brakes screeching and sirens howling, the heavy thud of subwoofers and drone of muffled engines--affronted Will as he climbed out of his rented green Dodge Ram van, the replacement for a forcibly borrowed burgundy Subaru Forester, itself the successor to the stolen primer-gray Chevrolet. He shuttled the noise to the back of his mind space, letting it fade as it would once the hours of the night wore on. 

A baby-faced parking valet helped Will with unloading the wheelchair from the back of the van. He even tried to help with lifting Hannibal down from the vehicle onto the seat, but Will barked at him. 

“ _No_.” Then he said, to mitigate the abruptness, “Easier if I just do it.”

The kid looked doubtfully at the way Will favored his right arm, but he said nothing, opting instead to hold the wheelchair still as Will clenched his teeth through the pain and assisted Hannibal. The touch of Hannibal’s fingers on Will’s arm was feather-light, the weight of his body heavy and almost unmanageable for the two of them. But he was awake. 

“Thank you,” Hannibal said to the valet, barely above a whisper, his voice metallic and raspy from disuse. Will tipped the young man and took their parking slip. 

“Hope everything works out,” the kid said, handing Will their one bag before he climbed in and drove the van away.

The hotel lobby was rich but not ostentatious: recessed ceiling panels soared above heavy square columns, both stained a black walnut. The floor was a contrasting pale marble, glimmering under soft-shaded lamps. At this time of night there were only a few souls about, none of them lingering at the desk. Two of them had bandages on their faces: one across his nose, another under her chin. Probably both were patients at the famous Myron and Sadie Fleischer Pavilion for Craniofacial Surgery, at the St. Louis City Hospital, across the street from the hotel.

Good, Will thought. The bandage across his own cheek would not arouse suspicion. Not here.

The woman at the front desk took in the bandage on Will’s face without a second glance. She was pretty, brunette, and older than she seemed, judging by the smooth, overly tight forehead and too-high eyebrows. Full face lift, botox injections, and not enough judgment.

“I have a presidential suite with handicap access that I can upgrade you to,” she said. “There’s a second bedroom.”

“One is fine,” Will said, glancing down at Hannibal’s face. Hannibal’s eyes were closed. “I need to be able to hear him if he needs me.”

She nodded, manicured nails clicking away at her keyboard. 

The elevator carried them ten stories in an effortless glide, so smooth that Hannibal did not raise his chin from his chest until they were in their suite. Will moved the red and white pair of towels that the hotel staff had twisted into a pair of kissing swans off of the king bed. He pulled back the down comforter and reached to help Hannibal transition from the chair to the bed. Hannibal smiled dimly as Will’s arms encircled his waist. 

“On three,” Will breathed into his ear. 

“On three,” Hannibal whispered back, hoarse over the scratching of his beard on Will’s uninjured cheek. Will closed his eyes against the burning of Hannibal’s skin.

The lift went better this time, as it always did when they were alone. Will helped Hannibal settle his limbs into a comfortable position and began undressing him, one-handed, careful not to jar Hannibal suddenly, to brush against his abdomen, or to press against the wiry knot of stitches in the skin of his back. Will was getting good at it now, and Hannibal was asleep again before he finished. His breaths whispered a soft contrast to the distant traffic. 

There was a dim red blackness then, as Will ran fingers over his own closed, dry eyes. 

He covered Hannibal with a sheet and straightened to stand at the foot of the bed. He gazed down on Hannibal’s still form as a survivor gazes down on one newly deceased. He had once stood so to hold his own father in his mind, in the still perpetuity of remembrance and grief, after the man had passed. He had stood so at the feet of countless victims, draped in white sheets on the stainless steel of an autopsy table. And so he had stood at the foot of the grave of Abigail Hobbs. 

One stands at the side of those who convalesce, at the feet of those who die. 

***

Will sank into the hot bathwater and let it cover his face. 

It had been easy to let Hannibal lift him up, to draw into him, to listen to the fleeting beats of his heart, to wrap him in an embrace, to warm him with their bodies and blood. To carry him over.

It was easy to fall, just as once it had been easy to trust. As easy as falling in love.

Being in love had once been hard to face, but no longer. Now that he had heard the words--had died and returned to life in Hannibal’s arms--knowing that love bore them up seemed the only right and natural thing in the world. 

It was easy to see. Easy to know. Easy to feel.

In Will’s life, what was easy in the present always led to difficulty in the future.


	2. For Better, For Worse

Dawn brought another gray day. Rain tapped on the glass of the windows, an unpredictable staccato of sound above Will’s head. Behind it came the shrill of wind and the dim rumble of engines far below.

Once he had found peace in such sound. Such solitude. 

Water spread warmth through his aching muscles and bones, promising restoration, healing. His legs still felt weak from endless hours of driving, relieved only by anxious trips into the grimy subway tiles of convenience store bathrooms. Or he might catch an hour of fitful sleep in a rest stop parking lot, with barking dogs and crying children and the grinding roar of purging semi-trucks and generators around them. With the engines off to save fuel, the vehicles cooled quickly in the winter air, and Will would wake less than an hour later, shivering, his shoulder and face burning, trying and failing to remember what health and warmth and rest felt like again. 

Each time they stopped, Hannibal spoke less, and looked about less, and shivered less.

In the first few hours in the hotel, Will had dreamed again of Hannibal floating above him, a thin miasma of red swirling around his abdomen. The meager light of dawn cascaded through the curtains of water around his limp silhouette, bearing him up like an ascending angel. Below him, Will sank into the eternal darkness, into fire and into ice. His kingdom come, his will done. This was his design.

But such was not to be. Weight came back to Will’s limbs as the water drained around him, dragging him down into the resin of the tub, air cooling his skin, stealing the warmth of the bath and leaving him shriveled and cold. He lacked the spirit and strength to immediately rise. He gathered himself slowly, breathing deep through his nose, nostrils flaring. He flexed his stomach muscles to draw himself up, sensing the ache in his shoulder as if he stood outside himself, a spectator only to the pain. It was less than it had been the night before, less than yesterday, less than all the days before. He was healing. 

It was no comfort.

He dried and dressed and tended his bandages and combed his hair and ran a hand over his returning stubble. He should either shave it or let it grow into a full beard.

Hannibal’s voice murmured from the bed as Will hung the towels and tidied the bathroom in lieu of the housekeeping staff he had warded off with the flimsy “Do Not Disturb” sign. Hannibal was speaking another language, fragments of words and sounds that could have been Italian. He had not spoken English in about an hour, but it did not matter. His mumblings had stopped making sense even before that, while Will lay sleepless in the bed next to him and listened to his whispering accent, rising and falling like gentle waves on a stony beach.

When the bathroom was neat and clean, Will returned to the dim bedroom. He seated himself at the desk, looking out the window over a city bleached and distorted in the flecks of water trailing down the glass. He tried to imagine--tried to _remember_ \--a world without Hannibal in it, but it stood outside him as he stood outside his own pain: flat, without meaning. Without light and air and color.

The lights of the hospital across the street gleamed a gentle blue, seeming brighter than they should during daylight hours. Will fingered the bandage on his cheek, relishing the shock of pain that arced through his jaw and skin, blinding him for a moment, driving out all other thoughts, all other pain. Reaching forward to the window, he opened it as far as it would go--a mere four inches before the window stop caught the frame with a sharp bang. 

A cool breeze swirled through Will’s fingers as behind him, Hannibal said, quite clearly, “ _Allora_.”

Will turned. Hannibal was looking at him, his mouth open as if searching for words that would not come, chest rising and falling with deep breaths. If he knew who Will was, Will could not tell. 

“ _Allora_ ,” he said again. His eyes fell closed, and he returned to his soft murmurs. He lay there, sweating, his skin gray and shriveled, his beard rough and growing unevenly, his too-short hair greasy and limp, a shadow of the man he once was, suffering and confused. 

An understanding of his own cruelty, his own disloyalty, came spilling through Will as he watched his friend giving way now to the ugliness of any animal’s death in waste and disease. Will had wanted them to be beyond betrayal, joined in what new world they could create between the two of them as they had become, risen into new life from death beneath the waves. But he had been selfish, and his understanding of this last betrayal of Hannibal’s faith in him jarred him into motion. 

There was only one way he could rectify this. He turned from the window, leaving it open so he could breathe the scent of rain. He needed clarity, lucidity. 

Crossing to Hannibal, he sat on the edge of the bed. Hannibal did not seem to notice him there, continuing his quiet ravings, tossing his head. The scent of sickness was heavy about him.

Perhaps the man that Will had known was already dead, with only this crude shell of neglected flesh remaining, in spite of all Will had tried to do to save him. His life had been such blinding brilliance, such inky blackness. This slow fade into the twilight, into grayness, into nothing . . . it was beneath him. He deserved better. He would want better. 

Will smoothed the tape around Hannibal’s IV line and wiped the beads of sweat away. Hannibal quieted beneath his touch.

Breathing deeply, Will closed his eyes. The shining pendulum swung in the darkness before his vision. Will waited for it to still. 

_He saw Hannibal, saw him lying just as he was now, saw him open his eyes as Will’s shadow covered his face. He saw himself pressing his thumbs against the hard cartilage beneath the scrape of Hannibal’s unkempt whiskers, saw Hannibal’s voiceless mouth open and slacken, his eyes lose focus, his tongue work against the air. He saw Hannibal’s hands come up to his wrists in an instinctive gesture not even delirium could prevent. He saw those once-strong hands grow weak, the veins shrink, the tendons spasm._

_He felt the weak kicking of Hannibal’s heels against the mattress, growing slower, stilling. He felt the series of pops as Hannibal’s trachea gave way under his fingers, and still Will pushed, tightened, as seconds ticked into minutes and Hannibal’s hands dropped and he jerked and turned in meaningless paroxysms before his bladder and bowels released and filled the air with foulness. And then he lay still._

_Will saw as the hapless housekeeper came and found the body, dropping her bundle of towels and staggering backward, hand covering her mouth. He saw as the police arrived, and then the FBI, Jimmy Price pulling Will’s own prints off the desk while Brian Zeller measured the hand-spread on Hannibal’s neck. He saw as Jack Crawford came slowly into the room, hands in the pockets of his overcoat, his eyes cold and his expression grim as he circled the man who had once been his friend, now a corpse lying in its own filth, barely recognizable beneath the scruff and sweat and grime of his debilitation._

No. This would not be the story Freddie Lounds would tell.

“Will.” 

Will started and came to himself to find Hannibal looking up at him with red eyes. But they were clear, and there was recognition in them. 

“Dr. Lecter?” Will said softly to him. 

Hannibal gave the tiniest of smiles. He closed his eyes as if the effort of speaking had already been too much for him. “You smell nice, Will.”

Will pressed his lips together and breathed a little laugh. “It’s just hotel soap, Hannibal.” 

Hannibal did not seem to hear. Will watched as he drifted away, like a feather in a swift current. 

***

That first breath an infant takes--the shocking blow, the gasping reflex, the painful filling of the lungs, the weak cries--initiates the cycle of living and breathing that no one can then simply choose to stop. Life begins with immeasurable cruelty. 

As Will’s head broke the surface of the water, he could see himself as if from above. He looked down on his struggles in the foaming salt and remembered other rebirths: his return to the world after the asylum, after the gutting. Now here again life began anew with choking pain and burning wounds. Hannibal ripped away from Will in one second, thrust up against him in the next. Always Hannibal.

As with any birth, the memory fades. He remembered the cold, the heaving of waves, the red pulse of his blood through his stinging vision, his hands reaching into the air, the dawn breaking on the rocks in gleaming red shafts of light.

_Red light at night, sailors’ delight. Red light in the morning, sailors take warning._

Pebbles pressed against his cheek, against his teeth and tongue, the enormous weight of the earth holding him against the sands as sea lice swarmed around him in the incoming tide. He opened his eyes and met Hannibal’s warm gaze. It seemed the only warmth left in the world. 

He began to laugh.

It was barely a whisper, little more than a cough, water and sand bursting around his mouth. 

Hannibal’s lips curved into an answering smile. He breathed deeply, gathering himself to turn on his back to look up at the glory of the red morning. They had survived. They lived. 

Life begins with immeasurable cruelty. It ends much the same. 


	3. For Richer, For Poorer

Skamandros Mercantile was only six blocks from the Marcus Hotel, and Will chose to walk, as tired as he was. He needed to stretch his legs and breathe. He kept the collar of his coat turned up against the sharpness of the air, still cold with the bite of winter, as it blew through the wind-tunnels of narrow downtown streets. The coat was cashmere and silk, a charcoal blue, with a tartan scarf of faded blue and gray and white knotted under Will’s chin. The clothes had been Hannibal’s choice, of course. Like so much else. 

He almost missed the store completely--the storefront was brick and glass with only small steel letters over the door in a well-spaced traditional Greek font, and little light emanating from within, almost as if the proprietors would rather not attract business from the street. Better to keep the wrong sort of clientele away, Will thought. He tried to dismiss the old resentments, for Hannibal’s sake. Hannibal was not the wrong sort. 

The door was heavy and rang an old-fashioned string of bells against the glass as Will opened it. A warm scent of cinnamon, sage, and clove enveloped Will. 

The brick continued along the inside walls. Wooden cubbies held a variety of mens’ shoes, and a scattered assortment of racks displayed scarves and leather bags amidst leather couches and rough-hewn tables, one bearing a Chinese marble-and-jade chess set. The left wall had been converted to white drywall where a variety of decor had been staged, including an enormous antique two-man saw. A misery whip, Will remembered it was called. A trophy salmon was mounted nearby--as if anyone had acquired _that_ anywhere near St. Louis--as well as a 12-point elk’s head, a leather fedora hanging from one of its lower tines. 

A dark-haired man, a few years’ Will’s junior, with luminescent eyes and a heavy brow, approached. He smiled in a detached way. “Welcome to Skamandros Mercantile. May I help you find anything in particular?”

“Do you carry antiques?” Will asked. He found the man’s small wooden nametag: Gabriel. 

Gabriel inclined his head and gestured behind him. “We have a small selection of antique accessories, toiletry sets, and some clothing and art items. If you’ll follow me, sir?”

He led Will to the back of the store and up a set of cable-hung, industrial stairs to a second floor. It was darker and tighter here, with the heavy smells of cedar and real fur pelts. Gabriel wove between racks and cabinets to a glowing display case that glittered and shone with silver and filigree, mirrors and blades and little glass bottles. Will’s eyes sought and found three men’s toiletry sets, but he knew right away which one he would have. The Count’s coronet above the letter “L” enameled into the top of the lid was all he needed to see.

“May I see the toilet set on the right, please,” he said. 

“Of course.” Gabriel glided around to the back of the display case and knelt to unlock it and slide the doors open. He reached in and pulled out the box. 

“You have exceptional taste, sir,” he said. “This one is Victorian, silver gilt and Coromandel wood, circa 1845. The set is complete. 28 pieces, all silver.”

He set the box down, unlatched it, and swiveled it around to face Will as he lifted the lid with a flourish. He had slender bones in his hands and neatly trimmed, flat fingernails.

Inside the box were a number of small, oblong bottles with silver tops, hand powder boxes, and snuff boxes, their shapes remembered in the black velvet from the pressure of almost two centuries. Gabriel demonstrated how a shallow bottom drawer pulled out and displayed tiny scissors, a miniscule mirror, tweezers, a straight razor, more. The upper section lifted to each side to reveal a central compartment that held the boar's hair brushes and combs and a larger hand mirror.

“Are you a collector?” Gabriel asked.

Will shook his head. “It’d be a gift. A wedding gift.”

“How thoughtful. As a wedding gift, the toilet set is very traditional.”

“How much?” Will asked. 

“This set is valued at $20,000.”

Will lifted his eyes to regard the young man steadily, gauging his willingness to barter. The poor knew how to play this game as well as the rich--it was only the middle class who would be out of their league here--but Gabriel was just an employee. He would not be authorized to come down very far, not without a call to the owner. 

Reaching out, Will lifted the brush carefully out of the box, heedless of the flash of annoyance he felt from Gabriel, whose responsibility it would no doubt be to polish the oils of Will’s hands off of the silver before he left that day, should he not make a sale. He wondered if that minor breach of self-control would have been enough to land Gabriel on Hannibal’s dinner menu, and if so, what would Hannibal have taken from him. Liver, perhaps? Gabriel must be storing a lot of bile by this point in his career, peddling vanity items to the extravagantly wealthy. Or--better yet--loin, the most beautiful, tender cut of meat, from a man growing calloused everyday.

Will hefted the brush in his hand, then set it back as if disinterested. “Twelve,” he said. 

“For a complete set in such impeccable condition, from the height of the custom of presenting a fine toilet service upon marriage, twenty is not an unreasonable sum to ask.”

“Twenty is not an unreasonable sum to let it sit in the display case for another year,” Will said. 

Gabriel pursed his lips. He made a commission, Will suspected. His gleaming, handsome eyes wanted the sale. He needed the money.

“I couldn’t even bring such a price to the owners,” Gabriel said finally.

“You could bring fifteen to them,” Will said. “All in cash.” 

As Gabriel considered, Will’s mind reached out and back to the Marcus Hotel, to Hannibal lying asleep in the bed, well medicated, eyes dim, mouth open and working in silence as he stared up at the ceiling above him. His hands plucked at the coverlet Will had tucked neatly around him. They shook like an old man’s hands. 

Would he come out of his stupor? Would he look for Will, call for him? Would he rise, confused? Would he fall? 

Perhaps he would not rise at all.

Will cut Gabriel’s considerations short. “I’m on a schedule,” he said. “Make your call.”

***

Joy was a flood, a swelling and a lifting and a rain from above, at once as foreign and frightening as it was liberating and just.

Was this the direction Hannibal had come when he brought Randall Tier? Will wondered as they turned down the street that ran adjacent to his old property, on the other side of the trees.

A light dusting of late snow had begun to fall in the fields of Wolf Trap. The morning was dim, early, barely light enough to see. The frosted grass and bare trees stood motionless in the chill air.

Will drove the pickup: Hannibal’s gunshot wound made driving too painful for long stretches. Will’s arm struggled with the gearshift in spite of Hannibal’s attention to the wound. An infection was starting in him, he knew. But treating it would have to wait. 

Hannibal looked out at the gray sky from the passenger seat, a smile playing about his lips. Joy, too, for him had once been fleeting and unknown: satisfaction and happiness had come and gone and paled next to the actualization of love. Will felt it pouring from him. His cup runneth over.

He waited in the car for Will. He knew much of waiting. So did Will.

The new dogs of the place greeted Will with little huffing sounds as he skulked in the dark around their home. He let them explore him with their heavy breaths and wet tongues and wagging tails. They knew him from old smells and such spirits of memories as remote places sometimes held. He was a familiar, a friend, a spirit of long ago. They met and shared his joy, and they touched him and guided him home.

His hands found the latch to the barn. He slipped inside to the deeper darkness. 

The wolf-cave bear suit hung hulking from the ceiling of his mind like a bat, stirring in a draft that was only present in Will’s imagination. The shifting shadows held promises, terrors, mounted on sharp points and shining on leather skin. Their touch was soft as fur and smooth as the blade of a knife.

Will’s hands found the ladder to the loft in the darkness and he flitted up to the top as if he possessed no more substance than the shadows themselves. In silence he moved, no more troubled by the fear of making a noise that would betray him as Hannibal himself would have been. He felt almost as if Hannibal were moving through him, directing his hands and feet and even his breath and heart rate. 

The wall panel slid off just as easily as Hannibal had said it would. Will brushed aside the wisps of spiders’ webs as he sought the rough canvas bags Hannibal had said he would find. There was a musty smell and the tickle of dust in his nostrils, but these faded as he lifted the bags and swung them over his shoulder. They felt strangely light, but he could feel the bulk shifting and sliding as he descended the ladder and emerged into the gathering light of early morning. 

Forty thousand dollars. 

It had no substance, no reality, no tangibility as he watched out of the corner of his eye as Hannibal inspected the contents, setting aside the bag with the vacuum-sealed clothes, while they drove away into anonymity. 

In the feeble light from the dash, Hannibal’s strong hands sorted through bundles of cash and papers and cards. The veins snaked around his knuckles and tendons, hypnotic.

“It was for us, wasn’t it?” Will said to the windshield. He knew what he would see if he looked. “For _all_ of us.”

Hannibal’s seeking fingers paused, stilled. He drew out a card--a driver’s license--and ran his wide thumb over the tiny picture of Abigail’s pale face, her enormous blue eyes. Will kept his own eyes on the road ahead, but he could feel the touch just as if the ridges of his own fingerprint were smoothing the plastic.

“Yes,” Hannibal said simply. “A nest egg. Just in case.”

Will risked a glance at him then and their eyes met in an infinitesimal moment before Will turned back to the road. But it was enough to loose the flood of joy between them in a violent rush, made more sweet by the shared sorrow that laced it. 

Joy was different and strange, and they lingered in its fathomless waters like the unseen creatures of the deep.


	4. In Sickness and in Health

Soap, fragrance, brushes. Rosehip oil in steaming water. Hot lather. A warm towel. A straight razor.

Will led Hannibal gently to the bath and lowered him in.

The rooms were now spotless around them. Bach’s Cello Suites drifted through the dim light, not too loud. Rain drummed softly on the windows. 

Will lay Hannibal’s head back against the sloped side of the white bathtub, warm now from the near scalding heat of the water. Hannibal had not spoken since Will had roused him enough to move him to the bathroom, discard his old bandages, and prepare for the bath. His movements were heavy, weaker again than even the night before, when Will had first brought him to what would soon be his deathbed. 

_ We were supposed to get better _ , Will thought, watching Hannibal’s eyelids flutter closed. Unrecognizable amid a camouflage of white bandages on wealthy plastic surgery outpatients, here in a city with its own identity adrift between the Midwest and the South, they had been supposed to heal. 

As Hannibal lay, quiet now, Will began the process of bathing him, cupping water in his shaking hands and in one of the glasses the hotel had provided, to wet Hannibal’s skin above the level of the water. Tearing the skin around Hannibal’s stitches was out of the question, so Will had kept the water low, just up to Hannibal’s hips.

He worked slowly. Sitting on the rounded edge of the tub, undressed so as to keep his own clothes dry, he drew the water up to Hannibal’s shoulders and let it slither down through the hair on his chest and stomach. He wondered if Hannibal even felt his touch. 

Will lifted Hannibal’s arm and stretched it out across his own thighs, wetting it, drawing his own hands over the curves of muscle and lines of tendon, down to the tips of Hannibal’s fingers. He traced the same shape over again with the soap he had bought for the occasion, also from Skamandros Mercantile, and then reached for Hannibal’s other arm, careful this time of the IV line. Hannibal never stirred.

Will then ran the soap over Hannibal’s chest and worked it to a good lather, careful not to let drops trickle onto Hannibal’s stitches. He would clean the wounds one last time and re-dress them after the bath, and then give Hannibal his latest doses and injections. Now was for Hannibal himself, not his injuries.

Water up and over, down through the landscape of bone and muscle, soap and skin. Will’s fingers traced each of Hannibal’s ribs, up and over the sternum, across the flat of the breastbone. He pulled Hannibal to him and held him against his own chest, nearly as wet now as Hannibal’s with both water and sweat. He reached down over Hannibal’s shoulders to carefully clean the swollen, bruised expanse of his back and up the narrow nape of his neck to his hair. Will’s arms trembled with strain and the lack of sleep that one short night in the hotel had not cured. He washed and rinsed gingerly, letting water splash down onto the tile and into the floor drain as he tilted Hannibal’s head back to keep the shampoo out of his eyes.

As he lay Hannibal back again, he found Hannibal’s eyes looking up at his face. Pain knitted Hannibal’s brow and brought out his crow’s feet. But for the moment, he seemed to know Will. 

“Hannibal?” Will asked. 

“Will,” Hannibal said, almost voiceless. “Thank you.”

Will nodded, saying nothing. He knelt at the edge of the tub and leaned down, reaching into the water. He drew the soap over the bones of Hannibal’s hip and across his lower abdomen to the other side, then down onto the loose muscle of Hannibal’s thigh. He looked up to Hannibal’s face, and Hannibal nodded once, still pained, but granting permission. Will cleaned him with tenderness and care and moved on to his other thigh and down to the long angles of his lower legs. 

Then Will drained the bathtub and let it fill again with clean, hot water, as he got slowly to his feet, his knees and back aching with stiffness.

Hannibal lifted a weak hand as if he meant to rise also, but Will stopped him. “No,” he said. “I need to shave you.”

Turning the water off, he took his position at the edge of the tub again. Will wrapped Hannibal’s face in a hot, moist towel, then rested, calming himself, finding his center, letting his tired arms and hands relax. The little tremble eased up. 

Removing the towel, he filled the antique brush with hot lather from the dispenser and spread it over Hannibal’s cheeks and jaw. They were rough from the several days’ lack of keeping--days that had brought them from the swell of the ocean at the tip of the Chesapeake Bay all the way across the South to New Orleans and then up the Mississippi to St. Louis. Had it been three days? Four? It couldn’t be five, could it? 

In another time, Will would have felt Hannibal’s eyes on him, thinking, considering, watching always, knowing his thoughts and feelings even as Will knew them. But now Hannibal’s eyes did not seem to see him. They looked into a future Will could not see. 

Will took up the straight razor and paused, watching Hannibal’s face, looking at his parted lips, measuring the beat of the pulse at his neck. Then he reached out to draw the skin taut, and he slid the razor slowly down Hannibal’s cheek, listening to the scrape of blade on skin and hair. First the right cheek, then the left, then carefully under the line of his square jaw. 

“You’ve done this before.” Hannibal’s voice came quietly as Will cleaned the blade. 

Will glanced at him, and then looked back to his work. “I had to learn to shave my grandfather when he got to the point where he couldn’t take care of himself. He insisted on a straight razor.” 

“You must have been a child still.”

“Old enough.”

“You haven’t forgotten.”

“I’ve always been good with my hands.”

It went easier then with Hannibal’s conscious help: above the lips, around the mouth, down the chin, along the front of the throat. Then a rinse, and a rinse of his body too, before draining the tub and beginning the long process of patting him dry, starting with his face and a splash of aftershave.

“Heavenly,” Hannibal whispered. His eyes had closed again.

“It doesn’t have a ship on the bottle.”

Hannibal did not seem to have heard. As suddenly as he had found his voice, he lost it again, his head hanging loosely now, mouth open, jaw slack. Will had to clean and dress the wounds where Hannibal lay in the tub. 

He could not wake Hannibal then and despaired of getting him back to the bed, what with Will’s own injuries and exhaustion. Perhaps here? he thought. Hannibal could be found here--clean, nude, the beautiful antique toiletry set arrayed about him, livid bruises blossoming on his neck. Will could bring in the food that should be arriving any moment now and display it next to him: chateaubriand--the most beautiful, tender cut of meat, harvested locally, of course--with orange cream sauce, okra and asparagus salad with lime and goat cheese, and a strawberry tart with crème anglaise and dark chocolate. A gentleman of exquisite taste, to the last. 

But the bed seemed more appropriate for a man on his wedding night. 

Hannibal stirred then, and Will went to him, and somehow they managed to raise him out of the bathtub and return him to the clean sheets of the bed. 

***

They lay in sand and rock, shivering, streaming saltwater from their clothes and skin. Above, they had converged; below, they were twain.

A distant thrumming arose as if from the earth beneath them. 

Dawn burst over the eastern horizon then, flooding the little cove with red-gold light and blue shadows, and for a while there was nothing but an icy brightness.

And then came pain.

It clawed its way out from the sand and gripped Will by the face with sharp talons that reached all the way to his spine and down into his throat. He remembered the knife then, the taste of its metal on his tongue, mingling with the metal of his own blood. He tried to turn onto his back only to be met with more pain--his chest by his shoulder, his hip and leg, a stiff back that almost could not move at all. He must have entered the water on that side. 

He lay, just breathing, and listened to that faint thrumming. It grew louder.

A moment later and he realized. He thrust himself up, pain or no, to find Hannibal struggling to do the same beside him. Their eyes met. 

“Jack,” Hannibal said. 

Will managed to get a knee under himself, and he hauled himself up and reached for Hannibal, who staggered. Gunshot, Will remembered. And Hannibal had been beneath him, mostly--he would have taken the greater impact in the water. How were they still alive?

It was a question that would have to wait. Just as their fall had been inevitable in the night, their survival--and escape--was inevitable in the cold light of dawn. Will had thrown the dice and come up snake eyes. But that choice was from a different life, gone now, and today they had to live. 

They stumbled, each holding the other, up the slope of the beach, the thrumming growing louder all the time. Rocks slid beneath their feet, leaving tracks a blind man could follow, but Jack would not be looking for tracks, not yet. 

They reached the line of trees and disappeared into the darkness just as the thrumming burst into the unmistakable  _ chop-chop-chop _ of a helicopter rounding the cliffside over the water. It sped away, up the line of cliffs to the house above, where it would land and find a mystery all too fresh. How long had it been? Only minutes? An hour? Will did not know. If Zeller was driving up in a vehicle, time would pass before he arrived and the crime scene processing began, and before the FBI would realize just how recently their victim had passed. But if Zeller were in the helicopter with Jack. . . . They had no time to lose.

An hour of hiking through the woods brought warmth back to Will’s body, though it did little to lessen his physical misery. Hannibal kept up somehow, untiring, his face serene. He was not bleeding. When Will looked at him, he smiled.

The “no trespassing” sign caught Will’s attention first, and he looked from it to another on a tree nearby, and then from tree to tree till they struck a rutted path. There was no fencing, no barbed wire that would indicate farm land. They must have come upon someone’s private hunting grounds. A road would not be far, or perhaps a cabin. 

The path widened into an overgrown road stretching to their right and left. Will spotted a power line. He followed it into what should be deeper woods. Cabin first, road after.

It was not long before they found it: a dusty shed of rough-hewn timbers that had once been painted brown. The power line terminated under the eaves, but it was dark inside, the two small windows revealing nothing but their own reflections as they approached. A ’76 primer-gray Chevrolet pickup sat parked near a hand-pumped well. 

Will put his palm on the hood. It was cold. The gun rack was empty. Hunting crows, maybe. It was too early for wild turkey. Someone could be inside. 

Will turned back toward the shack. “Anyone home?” he called. He knocked on the door. 

“Hallo the house,” Hannibal said, sounding amused.

“Best not surprise a hunter,” Will said. 

“We don’t know who may be in earshot,” Hannibal agreed. 

Will rattled the locked door and looked around. Cinder block foundation. He found the key in the crawlspace behind the first set of blocks. 

There was no deadbolt, just the lock in the knob. The key slid in and the door opened with a creak. A musty smell greeted them. Will went in and pulled the string to turn on the single bald light bulb in the ceiling. The scene surprised them both.

There was a cot on one side of the room, lying on its side. Various objects littered the space, strewn about haphazardly--tools and fishing gear. A three-legged stool lay upended near the cot. There was a small coal forge near one corner, probably used for melting lead into sinkers, with rocks between it and the wall for insulation. The rocks had spilled over the floor as if someone had fallen into them. Some of the rocks had dark stains. Everything had a thin layer of dust. 

Whoever had left the pickup was not inside.

“These floorboards are stained and shrunken,” Hannibal observed. “Pickled with tears.”

“Sad little bloodstains soaked into a dirty floor,” Will said. 

“How unfortunate. But their misfortune is our good fortune this morning.”

Hannibal crossed to the cot and stool and righted them, and then began the work of rummaging through the cabinets. He cleared a space and brought out an old metal bowl, a knife, a relatively clean cloth, and some other odds and ends. Will looked through the fishing gear and managed to find a few barbless J-hooks and a spool of finishing line, which he placed next to where Hannibal had set a 20 ounce jug of rubbing alcohol with its seal intact. He then took the bowl and went out to the well to pump water and fill it. 

The water was cold and clean and he drank his fill first, washing the salt of the ocean and his own sweat from his mouth. It was so good he did not even notice the spillage running from the opening in his cheek until it trickled down his neck to his chest, stained pink with his blood.

“Come, Will,” Hannibal said from the doorway. “They’ll come looking for us very soon.”

Hannibal had pulled the cot to the center of the room where he could make the most use out of the bare light bulb. “Sit, please,” he said. 

“You have a gunshot wound,” Will said. “We should do yours first.”

“We don’t want you to get infected,” Hannibal said with a slight smile. “End with a face that’s hard to look at. No, Will. I’m steady right now. Don’t know if I will be after you sew me up.”

Will acquiesced and sat, proffering Hannibal his upturned face. 

Hannibal examined his damaged jaw and broken teeth first. “How is the pain?” he asked. 

“Bad,” Will said.

“The teeth will need to be dug out,” Hannibal said. “I’d rather not go at them with a pair of dirty pliers if it can wait.”

“It can wait.”

The rubbing alcohol opened a whole new dimension of pain, and Will sat blinking for what seemed like an eternity before he could see Hannibal again. Next to that, the hooks and fishing line meant nothing as Hannibal sewed up his face--a minor annoyance, of less significance than a splinter. 

“There is a plastic surgery center in St. Louis,” Hannibal said as he worked. “Myron and Sadie Fleischer Pavilion for Craniofacial Surgery, at the St. Louis City Hospital. There’s a hotel across the street where people stay for outpatient surgery. We could convalesce there, hide our faces behind bandages no one will question, until we are healed enough to travel.”

“Where will we go then?”

“Whatever place you wish to be. We are citizens of a country no longer, not America, not France, not Italy, not Lithuania. We are a country unto ourselves, Will.”

“Cannibal country.”

Hannibal smirked. Will felt amusement rising in himself in response. It seemed a wonder, but he felt . . . free.

“A free country,” he murmured. 

Hannibal nodded, his look softening as he gazed down.

When he had finished with the stitches on Will’s face, Hannibal had Will undress and examined the flesh all along one side of his body, feeling each joint and each bone separately, checking his range of movement and watching him carefully. It was a long caress, and there was pain in it, but tenderness too, and Will marveled at it.

“You’re swelling,” Hannibal said. “You’ll be one single bruise from ankle to collar.”

He stitched up the chest wound just below Will’s shoulder next, and then it was Hannibal’s own turn. He lay back and talked Will through it--first cleaning as much as he could, checking for injured organs, the amount of bleeding, broken vessels, foreign objects, doing his best to stitch these up with his own easy skill with a hook and tying knots. It was both better and worse than it might have been--Hannibal would not bleed out from a burst vessel or sicken and die from a perforated bowel, but stitching someone together was so very much more complicated than ripping them apart. The stitches might hold for a while, but they had to get Hannibal more help. 

An hour later, Will joined a yellow wire to red and pink ones below a dirty dashboard, and the ’76 Chevy roared to life. 

Time was short, for two men who had slain a dragon and walked on water, all in one night. No time for weakness or injury--just a rough field dressing in an empty hunting shack, with rubbing alcohol antiseptic from a dusty old bottle and 20-pound monofiliment fishing line to hold them together.

_ No rest for the wicked _ , Will thought. 


	5. Until Death Do Us Part

Candles lit the hotel room, casting flickering shadows over the freshly turned-down bed, white on white sheets and pillows and down comforter. Fresh fire-and-ice lenten roses trickled lines of red trickling through the pure white like veins of blood in fresh snow--in vases, on the floor, on every surface, even the bed itself. Bach’s Cello Suites continued to play softly on the room’s speakers.

Hannibal lay in the center of the massive bed, propped up by the pillows, dressed in a blue silken men’s dressing gown, vintage, with wide gold lapels and a swirl of golden paisley. His head rested at a gentle angle, his loose mouth only open a little. One might have thought he was just sleeping. 

The meal lay untouched on the small round table for two: the chateaubriand, the salad, the strawberry tart. Champagne in a bucket of ice. A crime to waste it.

No, it would not be a waste, Will reminded himself as he settled his own dressing gown--a simple black--around his shoulders. This was his design. 

Will came to stand at the side of the bed to watch Hannibal’s shallow breathing for a moment. In a few days, when their prepayment had lapsed, the hotel manager would find him. Local police would find the hand-spread on Hannibal’s neck and take one look at the flowers and candles and conclude that this was a lovers’ accidental asphyxiation, or perhaps a quarrel. They would assume nothing more of the false IDs than men leading double lives, perhaps with wives and families to hide from. They would trace the license plate on record to the Enterprise car rental in Jackson. Then they would know there was something else going on from the different IDs on record there, also false. They would note the movement across state lines. And they would call the FBI. 

Will would have just those two or three days head start, and only a little cash left now. He did not know where he would go. He felt too tired to think. Florida, perhaps. Somewhere warm. He wanted a drink. Tanqueray martinis, like Molly and he used to have in the evenings, sitting and laughing between piles of blankets and warm dogs, after Wally went to bed.

He banished that thought.

Reaching forward, he took Hannibal’s hand in his own. It was cool now, almost cold, as if it had forgotten the heat of the bath already. Perhaps Hannibal’s circulation was starting to shut down. 

It was time. 

He climbed onto the bed, letting Hannibal’s hand drop to the sheet next to him, and crawled to position himself over Hannibal, straddling him, where he could get a good grip. He cupped Hannibal’s cheek in his palm, turning him to look upward. He looked a long time at Hannibal’s features, which he had come to know so well: the deep set eyes, the high cheekbones, the steep ridges of brow and jaw, the pronounced upper lip not quite covering his sharp teeth. 

On impulse Will pressed between Hannibal’s lips with his thumb and felt over the edges of those teeth. He traced the lips and remembered the voice he knew so well, hushed, saying his name, offering it up like a prayer: “Will. _Will_.”

It was then that he felt the first real moment of desperate sadness--the aloneness--he knew was to come. Will had chosen already once to end Hannibal and him both, to carry them over the edge of the precipice and into oblivion, to cut them cleanly from this world like the long overdue amputation of a gangrenous limb.

But they had lived. They had been born anew among the waves, reforged in the fires of dawn. There was no going back to what they had been before. They had _lived_. 

An illusion. Only Will had lived. Hannibal had died there on the rocks, among the weeds and foam. It could not be, but it was. This shell that lay beneath Will was only a shadow of the man who had been, malingering now, neither alive nor dead. Nothing to murder. Nothing to create. 

Will pressed his hand over Hannibal’s throat and began to squeeze. Hannibal’s skin was soft after the hot shave, his throat pliable, easy to close.

Who was Will Graham now, but a shadow of the man who had once been? Malingering always, it seemed to him now. Never quite the killer, never quite the innocent. No engine, no paddle. A floating island, adrift in an endless sea of time.

_You were supposed to be here_ , Will thought. _Or I was supposed to be gone. Not this. Not this._

He brought his other hand up and pressed with it too, harder. 

Hannibal moved then, a leg coming up to kick a heel against the bed. His eyelids fluttered as his mouth opened to gasp for the elusive air. More kicks, a knee to the kidney--fire on Will’s bruised side. Will winced and doubled down.

A little thrill of power came into him then, a little pleasure. He drew breath into his lungs in a long pull.

It seemed to him he could feel Hannibal standing just at the edge of the bed, over his shoulder, replete in a three-piece suit in navy plaid, with a cream and gold paisley tie and pocket square, looking down on the spectacle of his own strangling with interest. 

“Does it feel good to kill me even now, Will?” he said. 

“No,” Will wanted to say back, but he kept it to himself. He would not lie to Hannibal. Not now.

“The struggling is instinctive even in those who aren’t properly conscious,” Hannibal observed. 

“Brain screaming like a smoke alarm, even while the lights are going out,” Will said.

“Do you find this desperation, these spasms and jerkiness, to be undignified?”

“I would never imagine you giving in easily.”

Below Will, Hannibal’s eyes were open, unfocused. Both his hands gripped at Will’s wrists, shaking, so much weaker, so much less controlled, than they had once been. Will pushed forward, putting more of his weight on his knees. He was calmer now, steadied by the presence of his friend at his side. 

“We all reach for life even when we don’t know for what it is we reach. There is no greater siren’s call than to be alive. You fought for life, beneath the waves.”

“For all the good it did us.”

“Didn’t it? Do us good?” It seemed to Will that the Hannibal of his mind frowned, considering. “I didn’t want you to die to your own hand, Will.”

“Of course not,” Will said. “You’d rather see me struggle.”

Hannibal smiled then--the one on the bed as well as the one at his elbow--and then they were one, just Hannibal beneath him, looking up at him now, eyes clear, knowing him, now holding his wrists instead of clawing to push them away, his legs still. His lips formed a single, soundless word.

“Will.”

Will clenched his teeth against this, nostrils flaring, grip tightening as he bent lower, his face close to Hannibal’s now.

Hannibal reached up to him, his hand swaying in the empty air and then reaching to Will’s shoulder.

“Will,” Hannibal mouthed again. 

Hannibal’s hand touched Will, not gently but gripping, as if he had something to say, one last message to impart here in the last moments between them. Will tried to ignore it. He squeezed.

“ _Will_.”

It was too much. With his own strangled sound, Will released him, crumpling back in on himself as Hannibal arched his back and gasped, choking, coughing, filling his lungs. 

The moment was gone, slipped from Will’s fingers like smoke in the wind. 

“Will,” Hannibal whispered, all but voiceless. There were long pauses between his words as he spoke. “Wait . . . one night. Just . . . one night. Lie with me here, tonight.”

The thought of waiting another night--living another day like this--seemed monumental, impossible, a never-ending nightmare. He could not fathom it.

But it was what Hannibal wished.

Slowly, Will lowered himself down, finding a place for himself against Hannibal’s side. He remembered his own exhaustion. 

The warmth of skin and softness of silk lulled him, in spite of Hannibal's quick, weak breaths and racing heart. Letting out a long sigh of his own, Will lay his head on Hannibal’s shoulder and slept.

***

As the miles sped by, joy turned to fear. Fear turned to despair. 

They had not left Maryland before the sweat began on Hannibal’s face, and his conversation became punctuated by long silences. By Uniontown, he had fallen unconscious and Will had not been able to wake him until stopping at a one-night, seedy motel off I-70. In the early hours before sunrise they began the backtrack to turn south, to New Orleans. 

Will had few contacts in life from whom he could call in a favor, especially such a one as big as this, and fewer still who could give the kind of help Hannibal needed now. But he only needed one. 

Will had not wanted to push the speed limit in the stolen Chevy, and rush hour was underway before they even reached the outskirts of the city. Shadows lengthened across the freeway. Will rummaged into the duffel for one of the burner phones. He knew the number from memory. It would not matter that his own number would be unrecognizable. 

“Gerry,” Will said when the line picked up. “Will Graham. Pull a long shift tonight. I’ll pull up out back. Got it?”

At the affirmation, Will hung up and pitched the phone back into the bag. Hannibal did not twitch.

The veterinarian’s office was in a long, old white house behind a stretch of four traditional New Orleans homes still surviving on Tulane. It was not far from the courthouse, a sprawling neoclassical building with enormous fluted Corinthian columns and the nearby forest of bail bonds shops and cheap law offices, advertising _Bankruptcy $750--Divorce $500_ in bold letters under a smattering of graffiti. 

Will drove past the vet’s--it was still too early--and continued down the street to Quicky’s. He climbed out to get fuel and a po’ boy. Above him, bald white fluorescent lamps cast flickering cold light to capture his likeness in the faceless eye of a camera lens. It peered down at him as a pump funneled gasoline into the Chevy. He parked off to the side to eat, chewing awkwardly on one side of his mouth and watching the cop cars come and go from the courthouse in his rear view mirror. 

_Hold the criminal justice system ACCOUNTABLE_ , a nearby billboard said. 

“The impartial administration of justice is the foundation of liberty,” Will murmured in response.

The sun continued its slow descent into the west. Will watched it through the purple windows of a city bus, covered completely by a Stella Rosa ad telling him to “taste the magic” as it drove past the fleshy-colored industrial warehouse across the street. Twilight came and went in the fleeting manner it had in southern latitudes, and high sodium lights buzzed on all around, steady between the moving beams of headlights.

Will connected the wires that turned over the Chevy’s old engine and put it in gear. 

Gerry was sitting on the wrought iron rail that adorned the back landing of the house, in his scrubs, smoking a cigarette. He was a small man, with a little more stomach on him than Will remembered from the old days. He eyed the pickup as it turned into the small back parking lot next to the only other vehicle there--a burgundy Subaru Forester--without a flicker of expression on his face. When Will killed the engine, the man bent over and gently rubbed the coal off the end of the cigarette in a concrete urn by the door, leaving it perched, half-smoked, in the sand. 

“Will Graham,” he said as Will climbed out. “Long time.” His tone was only mildly curious. They had been friendly but not friends. He was a man who knew well the dangers of too much curiosity. He peered into the truck’s windows past Will’s head as Will came up the steps. 

“Somebody with you?”

“Best talk inside,” Will said. 

Gerry opened the screen door for them. There was a red sign posted inside the glass: _TOGETHER We Can End GUN VIOLENCE_.

“What’s up?” Gerry said as soon as the door clicked shut behind them. All around them dogs began barking from their kennels--those who were strong enough and brave enough, while the rest cowered away from the light or rested in a drugged stupor. The room was bright under fluorescent tubes, and it smelled of cleaning solution and animal urine. 

“I have a gunshot victim.” Will said. “Male, early fifties. Incident was two days ago. Bullet passed through his back and out his abdomen. There was a field dressing, makeshift materials. That’s all. Seemed okay for a while, then went downhill fast. Sepsis, maybe. Hospital is out of the question.”

“FBI work?”

“More or less.”

“What’s wrong with your face?”

Will blinked. The wound hurt, especially his teeth, but he had given it no thought in some hours. “Knife,” he said. “I was stabbed in the chest below my shoulder too.”

Gerry shook his head and scoffed a little. “Want me to take care of that too?”

“After. There’s some infection in the chest wound. Face seems okay.”

“All right. What have you got?”

“Fifteen.”

“Twenty. That’s a discount for old time’s sake. I can’t diagnose sepsis without a lab test.”

“Make your best guess.”

“Can he walk?”

“Think so.”

“Go get him. I’ll ready the table and equipment. Good to see you, Will.”

Outside, Will cautiously opened the passenger side door. Hannibal shifted but did not seem to wake. Will shook him. “Hannibal,” he said. “ _Hannibal_.”

No response. Will hesitated. He glanced up and down the street. A few people loitered in front of Alice’s One-Stop on Tulane, but the rest of the street seemed empty. He could go back in and get Gerry, but he did not want to take any more time, and two of them dragging an unconscious man would be even more spectacle than one. 

Mind made up, he reached in and unbuckled Hannibal, then rolled Hannibal’s weight toward the open door as he braced his own feet on the concrete. Hannibal pitched forward and would have fallen out if not for Will blocking him, bending just low enough to catch Hannibal’s hip over his uninjured shoulder to hoist his weight. It tested the muscle control of legs that had been sitting in a car for almost two days straight, but Will steadied himself against the truck door, and then grabbed the duffel. Shutting the door with his injured shoulder, he then made his way back into the building. 

Gerry made a sound of checked irritation when he saw Will carrying Hannibal. He came to help, steadying Hannibal and pushing aside stray equipment, and then catching Hannibal’s head as Will lay him down on the table. Will leaned on the corner of the table, trying to catch his breath.

“I hope your hopes aren’t up,” Gerry said. “Jesus. Help me get him undressed, at least.” 

He swore again when he saw the state of Hannibal’s back, which was as bruised as Will’s side was. The discoloration and swelling mottled and distorted the old Verger scar. “This isn’t from a gunshot,” Gerry said.

“He took a fall, after.”

“What’d he land on? Concrete?”

“Water.” At the look of disbelief, Will added, “It was a long fall.”

Gerry frowned down at Hannibal for a long moment, and Will wondered if he would recognize him. It had been a long time since Hannibal had been in the news, except for what TattleCrime reported, and Gerry was not the type to read dreck like Freddie Lounds. Had reliable news of Hannibal’s escape gone out yet? They had not stopped long enough to find out. 

But for the moment, Gerry’s back was to Hannibal as he prepped the X-ray machine. It was a new machine, even to Will’s untrained eye, and state-of-the-art. All of Gerry’s equipment was always new, one of the perks of being an on-call emergency doctor for local organized crime. He used the money so he could offer free veterinary services to those who could not afford it. Will used to place animals Gerry had rescued from fighting rings in exchange for turning a blind eye and getting an occasional “anonymous” tip. 

Gerry turned around and then suddenly stopped, started to speak again, and then stopped again. He was a plain-looking man, delicate-boned, of probable French descent, with brown hair and eyes over pale skin that showed the shadow of a narrow band whiskers above his lips and the edges of his jaw, even when he was freshly shaved. A face too long and too soft to be either handsome or memorable. He now regarded Hannibal with a stunned look. 

Will felt himself drain all emotion, like rainwater through a clean downspout.

Gerry’s gaze came up to look Will in the eye. 

“It’s Hannibal Lecter,” Will said. 

“I’m not--I can’t--”

“You can. You have to. Call the police here, it’s all over. You know that.”

“I don’t have to call the police.” Color began to return to his face, and he straightened his back. “Look at him. He’ll be dead in a few hours.” His lip curled. “So it’s true, then. What they say.”

“I don’t know what _they_ say,” Will said coldly. " _I_ say you are saving Hannibal Lecter’s life tonight.”

“I’m not touching this.”

“Are you growing a moral center, Gerry? Isn’t it a bit late for that?”

“This isn’t the same.”

“Twenty thousand dollars says it is. I need you to do this, Gerry.”

There was a long silence. Gerry remained perfectly still, looking at Will with no fear in his eyes at all. 

“Get out. _Get out_.”

Will stared at him a long time, feeling the thread of old experience and the years of unspoken trust stretched thin between them, gossamer as a spider’s web, trembling with strain. He felt at it, and it seemed to connect him with not just this man, but with all of the scattered pieces of his life that had gone before: before Hannibal, before the FBI, before wisdom, before madness and folly, and all the vexation of his spirit. The last such thread, forgotten till this day, this minute. The last such cord to keep alive the man he had once been, here in a city he had once thought of as home. 

He reached out to that tie and severed it. He heard his own voice coming from afar, like he used to hear Hannibal’s, through the fog of his own fevered mind.

“What _do_ ‘they’ say, Gerry? Do they talk about how I shot Garrett Jacob Hobbs ten times? I think only the first three or four were really necessary, but you can’t be too careful in this day and age. His blood sprayed all over. I couldn’t see out of my glasses because of it. I didn’t clean them. If I had cleaned them, I wouldn’t have been able to look at it. I wanted to look at it.”

Gerry’s face did not seem to have changed, but Will could feel it start within him, that unease that even Jack Crawford could not at times banish. 

“What do you want to look at, Gerry, at the ends of your long days here? Candace? The girls? They must be teenagers now. How are they?”

“I said get out. Psychopath.”

“I wouldn’t hurt them, you know that. It’s really _you_ they have to worry about. And you know that, don’t you? Do you ever get sick of yourself, thinking about it? I’ve always been fascinated by the mental gymnastics you must go through every night to justify, risking what you risk without any regard for them whatsoever. They must worry about you on long nights like this, here saving those who don’t deserve it so you can also save the ones who do. All creatures great and small, as they say.”

Will leaned against the counter behind him and relaxed, folding his arms over his chest. He watched himself lecturing at the man in the same way he used to lecture at FBI trainees.

“I killed a man once who wanted to be an animal. Or maybe he was an animal that just looked like a man. Randall Tier. A hunter. Thought he was hunting me. And I guess he was, at first. We ate him together, Hannibal and I. Lomo saltado. I learned the taste of fear that night. 

“Would you have saved him, Gerry? Was he a psychopath? An animal? Such a creature, both great and small. Bright and beautiful, wise and wonderful.”

Will waited. Gerry’s mouth worked, but he did not speak. 

“You said you wouldn’t have to call the police. You could just wait. Me, on the other hand, things are more urgent, I admit. I could make a phone call, I suppose. You think your number is the only number I have memorized from the old days? I think I know a few more. And they’re not police.

“I know you’re thinking about the Glock .40 S&W you’ve got in your jacket pocket. It’s a nice gun. Reliable, strong. You shouldn’t leave it hanging by the door back there. You never know who might come in off the street.”

His mouth snapped closed at that. Will tasted fear now. 

“What’s the longest you ever made Candace wait up for you on one of these nights? Till dawn? Did you work through the next day? Catch a _catnap_ in a back room here? How long do you want to make her wait this time? The people you work for, they would make her wait forever, wouldn’t they?

“I wouldn’t do that to you. They’d find you, eventually. She’d have something to identify.” He shrugged. “It might take a few minutes.”

“So, Gerry, let’s talk. Let’s _negotiate_. There’s a man, lying on your table there, and he’s a psychopathic killer. Probably killed hundreds of people by now. And you can save him, and he will keep on killing people. But in the meantime you’ll make a little fee, and you’ll put it back into this little business, and you’ll make a little difference in someone’s little life. Or you can choose differently, and tell yourself whatever it is you want to hear. Whatever it is that makes this somehow different than what you’ve been doing day and night for the last twelve years. 

“But I’m _not_ dying, Gerry. I’m right here across from you, very much alive. So what will it be? Will you do your job as a doctor of all creatures, great and small? Or will I go tell your wife she doesn’t have to wait up for you anymore?”

Gerry glared at him. But he moved to get to work. 

Watching him, watching that last little piece of himself shrivel and die, Will dismissed everything he had just said--and worse, _meant_ \--and he stood to go help Hannibal. 

***

The sounds of water brought Will awake. Rain tapped at the window glass. Over that came a light sound of a splash, then silence. 

Will opened his eyes to a gray twilight filtering in from the window between the glistening droplets of rain--pinpoints of little amber stars. The room was dim, the candles guttered and dead, their fragrance cooled and subsided. The red veins of the lenten roses had faded to black in the half-light. All was still.

Will closed his eyes again. He willed away the return of reality, warm and dry amidst the comfort of sheets and pillows and comforter. The room became unreal around him, all the evidence of his aborted design swept away in a bout of determined imagery: no candle stumps, no curling flower petals, no cold uneaten meal, no music to replace. No Hannibal dying next to him. 

He lay in this state for some minutes, listening to the sounds of rain. Someone beeped a car horn on the street below. A dog barked. 

The little splash sound came again, and Will realized it was not his imagination. He lifted his head and looked around the semidarkness, and that was when he saw that Hannibal no longer lay next to him. 

Blinking, he struggled to a sitting position. The bedroom was empty, the door to the bathroom standing open, filled with the same gloom and quiet. 

Another small splash.

Will swung his feet out of the bed and onto the floor, wrapping the simple robe, which had come loose as he slept, back around him. He stood and made his way to the bathroom door, passing the little table, set for two, as he went. A little of the food had been disturbed: a some meat cut off the chateaubriand, a slice of tart gone, a few specks of salad left on a tidy--but definitely used--plate. 

Will came to the threshold of the bathroom. Inside, Hannibal lay in the shadows of the bathtub, steam rising around him, his arms propped along the edges to keep his IV line dry, his head back, his eyes closed. His fingers trailed in the water, tracing circles, sometimes making the little splash. The tub was filled to the brim with no heed at all for Hannibal’s stitches, lapping right up to Hannibal’s bruising throat. 

“Will,” Hannibal said, though Will had made no sound. Hannibal opened his eyes and smiled, ever so slightly, a gleam in the dark. “Good morning.”

He lifted his hand up toward Will, palm upward, inviting. 

Will jarred into motion, going to him, his legs carrying him to the edge of the bathtub and over, discarding the robe on the floor behind him. He went to his knees as the water rushed over the sides of the tub in a wave onto the tile all around them. 

The rush of warmth and wetness slid over his back and shoulders as he settled against Hannibal’s skin. Hannibal’s arms and legs wrapped about him, cocooning him all around. His heartbeat was firm and steady below Will’s cheek, his breaths deep and regular.

Closing his eyes, Will fell into this heat and darkness, felt it spilling into him, through him, bearing him up, drawing him down.

For just a moment, it was endless all around him. 

Hannibal Lecter was alive. 


End file.
